Source: The Chronicle Herald
NOVA SCOTIA - Seven people were taken to hospital after a two-vehicle crash near Bear River on Friday.
Just before 3:30 p.m., RCMP received a 911 call about a two-vehicle collision at the intersection of Purdy and Waldeck Line roads in the Annapolis County.
"All seven were transported to hospital, six had non-life-threatening injuries, but one was more serious, but as of now we don’t have an update on the exact status of that one individual," RCMP spokeswoman Sgt. Brigdit Leger said early Friday evening.
One of the people injured was a young girl. Also hurt were two men and four women.
One of the vehicles contained three people while the second had four.
The cause of the crash is still under investigation.
Four ambulances with eight paramedics responded to the scene.
"We transported five to the Digby General Hospital and two to the Annapolis hospital," Paul Maynard, an Emergency Health Services spokesman, said.
LifeFlight was expected to fly one of the females — the most seriously injured — from Digby General to a Kentville hospital, he said.
The road was not closed down as a traffic analyst investigated, Leger said.
"My understanding is that it was sunny and clear at the time," she said.
The ages of the injured people were not available.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
wind and nuclear
Wind can't replace nuclear
Posted By
Posted 1 day ago
Editor:
Gideon Forman's letter urging us "to phase out conventional power and switch over to renewables, including wind turbines", demonstrates lack of technical understanding. It is not possible to replace coal or nuclear plants with wind turbines. They average only about 27% output in Ontario. Without base load plants such as nuclear, hydro, coal or gas we would all be without power the majority of the time no matter how many wind turbines or solar plants were built. The wind simply doesn't blow all the time at the required velocity and the sun often doesn't shine. Ontario is now constructing natural gas plants to back up renewables and it is those gas plants that will replace coal, not wind or solar.
Moreover, the Suzuki Foundation cautions: Unlike coal, "emissions of fine particulates from natural gas-fired power plants are dangerously small. They have the greatest impact on human health" because they "end up deep in the lungs. . . . Many studies have found no safe limit for exposure".
The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) plan of October, 2007 concluded that adding any substantial amount of wind power to Ontario's grid "would result in higher greenhouse gas emissions because of the need to install back-up gas plants".
Studies by the Irish Electricity Supply Board and the German Institute for Economic Research both confirm that CO2 emissions actually increase as a direct result of having to cope with the variation of wind-power output.
So what will the wind turbines and solar panels accomplish? Our government has contracted to pay 4 to 20 times above market rates for "green" electricity. Ratepayers will also pay for the gas to back up the wind as well as over $5 billion for new transmission lines. Our hydro bills are beginning to skyrocket. They have already risen 16% since November 2008. Two more rises of 9.6% and 13.3% have been applied for. The new HST and smart metres are estimated to cost us another 20%. And a new renewable energy program tax of $4 per year starts April 15. When electricity prices increase sharply, our province becomes less competitive. Manufacturers relocate. Unemployment causes the tax base to shrink.
The OPA report noted that it was more cost effective to develop hydro generation north of Sudbury rather than developing additional wind generation in southern or northern Ontario. Instead of listening to his expert advisors, former Energy Minister George Smitherman took control of the OPA and demanded inflated compensation for renewable electricity producers. He then abruptly resigned.
Keith Stelling Central Bruce-Grey Wind Concerns Ontario
Posted By
Posted 1 day ago
Editor:
Gideon Forman's letter urging us "to phase out conventional power and switch over to renewables, including wind turbines", demonstrates lack of technical understanding. It is not possible to replace coal or nuclear plants with wind turbines. They average only about 27% output in Ontario. Without base load plants such as nuclear, hydro, coal or gas we would all be without power the majority of the time no matter how many wind turbines or solar plants were built. The wind simply doesn't blow all the time at the required velocity and the sun often doesn't shine. Ontario is now constructing natural gas plants to back up renewables and it is those gas plants that will replace coal, not wind or solar.
Moreover, the Suzuki Foundation cautions: Unlike coal, "emissions of fine particulates from natural gas-fired power plants are dangerously small. They have the greatest impact on human health" because they "end up deep in the lungs. . . . Many studies have found no safe limit for exposure".
The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) plan of October, 2007 concluded that adding any substantial amount of wind power to Ontario's grid "would result in higher greenhouse gas emissions because of the need to install back-up gas plants".
Studies by the Irish Electricity Supply Board and the German Institute for Economic Research both confirm that CO2 emissions actually increase as a direct result of having to cope with the variation of wind-power output.
So what will the wind turbines and solar panels accomplish? Our government has contracted to pay 4 to 20 times above market rates for "green" electricity. Ratepayers will also pay for the gas to back up the wind as well as over $5 billion for new transmission lines. Our hydro bills are beginning to skyrocket. They have already risen 16% since November 2008. Two more rises of 9.6% and 13.3% have been applied for. The new HST and smart metres are estimated to cost us another 20%. And a new renewable energy program tax of $4 per year starts April 15. When electricity prices increase sharply, our province becomes less competitive. Manufacturers relocate. Unemployment causes the tax base to shrink.
The OPA report noted that it was more cost effective to develop hydro generation north of Sudbury rather than developing additional wind generation in southern or northern Ontario. Instead of listening to his expert advisors, former Energy Minister George Smitherman took control of the OPA and demanded inflated compensation for renewable electricity producers. He then abruptly resigned.
Keith Stelling Central Bruce-Grey Wind Concerns Ontario
Labels:
wind turbines nuclear power
Wind Resistance
Wind resistance
Wyoming is ideally situated to capitalize on wind energy, but not everyone wants to see that potential tapped.
By Jonathan Thompson
High Country News
Posted: 04/18/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT
I first see the turbines as I speed along Interstate 25 near Glenrock, Wyo. The windmills look tiny, sprouting from the flat beige plain like sunflowers in a neglected field.
Wanting a closer look, I take the Glenrock exit, meander through town, cross the North Platte River and soon discover that the landscape is not flat at all. It undulates, sometimes steeply. Railroad tracks run along the low point in a furrow, an age-streaked oil tank nearby. A massive power plant sits by the river; a trailer, its roof weighted down with tires, hunkers into the hillside.
Up another hill, there are the turbines again, but this time they rise up from sage and grass like giants. Their rotors spin neurotically, as though they are desperately waving me away — or warning, perhaps, that all is not what it seems.
Maybe Don Quixote wasn't crazy after all.
Wyoming may be the best place in the U.S. to generate electricity from wind. Thanks to a dip in the Continental Divide as it wends through the state, it has about half of all the top-quality wind in the country. A turbine here can crank out as much as 30 percent more juice than one in, say, Texas or California.
With a population of just half a million, the state has plenty of uninhabited spaces for turbines, and it is famous for welcoming energy development. So companies have stampeded into the Cowboy State, reaching for every gust they can. Wyoming's governor compares the frenzy to a gold rush.
That rush, however, is faltering. Today, Wyoming has just 1,100 megawatts of wind capacity, one-eighth of what Texas has. Facing regulatory and political uncertainty, at least one wind-farm proposal has been yanked off the table, and the future of others is in doubt. Legislators, wildlife officials and the governor's office have sent out increasingly mixed messages about the wind rush.
It is, indeed, confusing. Because most of the objections to wind farms cite environmental problems, it might appear that Wyoming has finally gone green — standing up to energy developers in hopes of preserving its wild lands. And many environmentalists do see wind as yet another "clean" energy source with a dark side, like hydroelectric dams or coalbed methane, which has transformed swaths of the state into drill-rig pin cushions.
Much of the resistance to wind actually comes from the fossil fuel industry and the politics it bankrolls. Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the nation and the third-largest producer of natural gas. Severance taxes and royalties from these industries keep the state's government, schools and other services afloat. In a sometimes convoluted way, wind threatens that old-school energy dynamic.
At an August symposium on wind energy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Aaron Clark, an adviser to the governor, put it candidly: "We can't let wind development hurt the state's revenue stream from extractive minerals."
The conflict manifests itself in two disparate characters: the oil-baron scion of one of Wyoming's most influential families, and a chicken-sized bird that may soon be listed as endangered. * * *
On a dark October afternoon, some 50 people converge on the Converse County Courthouse's community room. Nearly everyone is in jeans and cowboy boots, and at least half wear baseball caps, neckerchiefs and bulky Carhartt vests.
They're here because the county planning commission is considering a moratorium on industrial development in the mountainous part of the county in order to give it time to consider implementing wind-targeted zoning. The fledgling but already sizable Northern Laramie Range Alliance (NLRA) is pushing the moratorium. The group sprang up to prevent "industrialization of the high country" by the wind industry.
The moratorium shouldn't stand a chance. Converse County is one of a handful of Wyoming counties that have no zoning whatsoever, and it has enthusiastically shot down proposals to regulate development in the past. Given the look of tonight's crowd, this attempt at government interference will suffer the same fate. But the wind has dramatically muddled things in these parts.
Grizzled ranchers who likely would spit before they say the word "environmentalist" stand up and tout the benefits of green energy. Classic anti-government conservatives ask the county to save their beloved mountains from energy development. An employee of one of the biggest coal mines in the nation cautions against letting wind turbines go unregulated, the way coalbed methane did.
Then, a tall, lean man stands up to speak. For about nine minutes, he holds the floor with pointed comments, sprinkled with humor. "The second most egregious task of government is the denial of the use of a person's private property," he says. "The first is when Sheriff Becker over there takes away your personal liberty." Laughter. He worries about an influx of workers infecting the area with Gillette Syndrome — the social toll that a boom can take on the local community. Property values will plummet, he warns. The county should "take a deep breath and adopt the moratorium, because there are a lot of impacts that come with major development." He is a dyed-in-the wool Wyoming oilman, and his name is Diemer True.
True's father, H.A. "Dave" True, started his own drilling company in 1954. Today, True Companies is an energy, banking and ranching conglomerate, with everything from a pipeline company and a trucking business to slaughterhouses, not to mention a big chunk of Wyoming land. According to LandReport.com, the Trues hold more than 255,000 acres, putting them among the top 30 landowners in the nation.
Diemer True went to work for the family company after he graduated from college, became a partner in True Companies a few years later, and in 1972, was elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives. He has lived at the nexus of Wyoming politics and petroleum ever since.
These days, True can often be found in the headquarters of Diamond Oil, which he started with his sons a few years ago.
Nothing in his manner indicates the enormous amount of power he wields in this state — and in the nation. When he urges the government to save his beloved mountains from industrialization, you can almost forget that, up until now, True was firmly on the other side, aggressively attacking regulations intended to keep public lands from being, well, industrialized.
True served as chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a position from which he regularly urged the federal government to increase access to oil and gas development on public lands.
True was part of the Bush/Cheney energy task force, in which industry leaders influenced the administration's policies. As recently as 2006, he served on the board of Frontiers of Freedom, a neo-conservative, hard-right organization that calls itself the "antithesis of the green movement," fights against the Endangered Species Act and has recently taken up the torch of global warming skepticism.
True also served on the board of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a Denver-based property-rights, anti-environmental regulation group. * * *
Bob Whitton is a mustached, retired Air Force fighter pilot-turned- rancher who raises bulls on a small spread between Chugwater and Wheatland, across I-25 from the Laramie Range. There is broad support for wind development down here, and Whitton chairs the Renewable Energy Alliance of Landowners (REAL), a group with some 300 members who are fighting for the right to put turbines on their collective 800,000 acres of southeastern Wyoming. In that role, and as a private-property rights advocate in general, Whitton argued against True and his colleagues at the Converse County meeting.
Wind, it turns out, can make a rancher lots of money. Wind developers typically pay a signing bonus, rent during the testing phase and a payment during construction. When the turbines start kicking out juice, the cash flows regularly, for years to come: A turbine can net a landowner $4,000 for every megawatt per year. That could amount to as much as $55,000 per year per section (640 acres). Wyoming ranches are often measured by thousands of acres, so some landowners stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
That might keep cash-strapped ranchers from selling out to real estate developers or billionaire hobby ranchers, who sometimes close their land to hunters, says Whitton. "Would you rather see a wind turbine or a subdivision?" he asks.
The economic crisis has made it tough for wind developers to get financing. The Wyoming state Legislature this spring levied a generation tax on wind power, in addition to allowing a sales tax exemption on wind farms to "sunset" in 2011.
Combined with current property taxes, that could give Wyoming one of the least-favorable tax structures for wind farms among surrounding states. Every county in wind country, meanwhile, is grappling with its own level of rules, creating an uncertain regulatory environment for the industry.
But the biggest obstacle, by far, is lack of transmission capacity. "Most of the good sites [that have both strong wind and adequate transmission] have been leased and are off the market," says Brian Reilly of Whirlwind LLC, a Denver- and Casper-based wind firm with several Wyoming projects in the works.
The big markets for wind are in states with renewable portfolio standards, such as California and Colorado. (Wyoming has no renewable mandate.) So in order to get new wind power to those who want it, new transmission lines must be built from Wyoming to the south and west. "If we don't get transmission solved, we don't get any of the benefits," says Whitton. "Nothing happens."
* * *
In October, Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal told an energy conference that, in Wyoming, some folks who have made their money off gas and oil drilling and pipelines have "developed a sense of virtue about not destroying the environment," when faced with wind power. "They may be late conversions," he added, "but they are singing with great vigor in the front row of the choir."
Most likely, he was talking about Diemer True. True joined the choir last year, when he discovered that Rocky Mountain Power planned to string its 230-kilovolt transmission line right along La Prele Creek, where he has two ranches. Then, Wasatch Wind asked True and his neighbors to lease their land for turbines. True, nearby landowner (and World Bank vice president) Kenneth G. Lay and some of their neighbors held a meeting in Douglas in May 2009 to come up with a plan of action. Around 200 people showed up.
Now, the NLRA has some 600 members and, with its slick website, petition drives and well-oiled PR machine, it has gained enough clout to make traditional green groups jealous. Just months after the alliance formed, True took Rocky Mountain Power President Richard Walje up into the Laramie Range for a look around. As he basked in the quiet of the glades, pastures, aspens and ponderosas, Walje reportedly declared, "We can't build a power line here."
Rocky Mountain Power withdrew that route from consideration, moving it farther east — an unqualified victory for the group.
In its talk and actions, the NLRA and its members appear sincere; not only have they extended their reach beyond their backyards, but they're beginning — somewhat uncomfortably — to embrace a green attitude.
In October, the NLRA created the Northern Laramie Range Foundation to raise money to lease parcels of state land in the Laramie Range for recreational purposes. That will not only preclude wind development on those parcels, but it will also keep out other sorts of development — including oil and gas drilling.
True refuses to call himself an environmentalist: "I'd couch us as preservationists or conservationists."
* * *
Directly south of Rawlins, on a windswept mesa, Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz's company wants to build a 1,000-turbine wind farm on a patchwork of private and public lands. It will cover some 95,800 acres and generate 2,000 megawatts of power or more, equal to some of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the West. However, big sections of the farm overlap core sage grouse habitat.
The sage grouse was once plentiful across the sagebrush-covered West. As the sage was cleared for grazing, and later invaded by energy development and ranchettes, the bird's numbers plummeted. For the last five years, the prospect of the grouse being listed under the Endangered Species Act has loomed, something that could hit mining, ranching and energy here as hard as the spotted owl's listing hit timber in the Northwest. Wyoming has acted aggressively to put its own sage grouse conservation plan in place in hopes of averting a listing.
The state's strategy is simple: Find and map the parts of the state that are most critical to sage grouse, and protect these core areas, mostly through voluntary measures. The oil and gas companies have agreed to curtail activities in core areas — drilling is limited to one pad per section — or stay out of them altogether. In return, the state will streamline permitting and offer other incentives for drilling in non-core areas.
Because it wasn't much of a force — or a threat — when the core areas were drawn up, the wind industry was not involved. As a result, 23 percent of Wyoming's winds that are class 4 or higher — and about half or more of developable class 6 and 7 winds — are in core areas. And in July, the state put those winds off-limits by essentially banning big wind farms in core areas.
That has put the old-school energy in Wyoming at odds with the new. If wind development is allowed in core areas, it could undermine the integrity of the core-area strategy. That, in turn, could increase the likelihood of the feds listing sage grouse as endangered. And that would lead to stringent regulations for all the bird's habitat — including most of the current oil and gas fields and untapped reserves.
In Wyoming, there are two struggles. One is between the old school of energy and the new; the other pits the local view of energy against the global view. In the end, the failure to reconcile these dichotomies may be far more harmful to Wyoming's economy than any endangered species listing. More and more, the market is going to demand clean energy. Right now, however, Wyoming is not prepared to supply it.
The Converse County meeting ended with the planning commission voting to recommend a moratorium for the whole county. The county commissioners shot the moratorium down, but the NLRA continues its fight. And the struggle goes on.
On my way home, I stop at a place where the road nuzzles up against the wind farm's boundary. I slither through the fence and walk up to a turbine, until I'm directly beneath its blades.
The only sound is a low-pitched sort of watery sigh. The wind blows, the arms turn, and electrons flow through cables, down the tower, under the ground, and into the power lines where they'll join up with the coal-generated electrons 13 miles away. They flow into the bloodstream of the omnipotent, tentacled organism called the grid. Somewhere, someone flips a switch.
And there is light.
Jonathan Thompson is editor of High Country News. This article has been edited to fit. For the full version, go to www.hcn.org.
Wyoming is ideally situated to capitalize on wind energy, but not everyone wants to see that potential tapped.
By Jonathan Thompson
High Country News
Posted: 04/18/2010 01:00:00 AM MDT
I first see the turbines as I speed along Interstate 25 near Glenrock, Wyo. The windmills look tiny, sprouting from the flat beige plain like sunflowers in a neglected field.
Wanting a closer look, I take the Glenrock exit, meander through town, cross the North Platte River and soon discover that the landscape is not flat at all. It undulates, sometimes steeply. Railroad tracks run along the low point in a furrow, an age-streaked oil tank nearby. A massive power plant sits by the river; a trailer, its roof weighted down with tires, hunkers into the hillside.
Up another hill, there are the turbines again, but this time they rise up from sage and grass like giants. Their rotors spin neurotically, as though they are desperately waving me away — or warning, perhaps, that all is not what it seems.
Maybe Don Quixote wasn't crazy after all.
Wyoming may be the best place in the U.S. to generate electricity from wind. Thanks to a dip in the Continental Divide as it wends through the state, it has about half of all the top-quality wind in the country. A turbine here can crank out as much as 30 percent more juice than one in, say, Texas or California.
With a population of just half a million, the state has plenty of uninhabited spaces for turbines, and it is famous for welcoming energy development. So companies have stampeded into the Cowboy State, reaching for every gust they can. Wyoming's governor compares the frenzy to a gold rush.
That rush, however, is faltering. Today, Wyoming has just 1,100 megawatts of wind capacity, one-eighth of what Texas has. Facing regulatory and political uncertainty, at least one wind-farm proposal has been yanked off the table, and the future of others is in doubt. Legislators, wildlife officials and the governor's office have sent out increasingly mixed messages about the wind rush.
It is, indeed, confusing. Because most of the objections to wind farms cite environmental problems, it might appear that Wyoming has finally gone green — standing up to energy developers in hopes of preserving its wild lands. And many environmentalists do see wind as yet another "clean" energy source with a dark side, like hydroelectric dams or coalbed methane, which has transformed swaths of the state into drill-rig pin cushions.
Much of the resistance to wind actually comes from the fossil fuel industry and the politics it bankrolls. Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the nation and the third-largest producer of natural gas. Severance taxes and royalties from these industries keep the state's government, schools and other services afloat. In a sometimes convoluted way, wind threatens that old-school energy dynamic.
At an August symposium on wind energy at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Aaron Clark, an adviser to the governor, put it candidly: "We can't let wind development hurt the state's revenue stream from extractive minerals."
The conflict manifests itself in two disparate characters: the oil-baron scion of one of Wyoming's most influential families, and a chicken-sized bird that may soon be listed as endangered. * * *
On a dark October afternoon, some 50 people converge on the Converse County Courthouse's community room. Nearly everyone is in jeans and cowboy boots, and at least half wear baseball caps, neckerchiefs and bulky Carhartt vests.
They're here because the county planning commission is considering a moratorium on industrial development in the mountainous part of the county in order to give it time to consider implementing wind-targeted zoning. The fledgling but already sizable Northern Laramie Range Alliance (NLRA) is pushing the moratorium. The group sprang up to prevent "industrialization of the high country" by the wind industry.
The moratorium shouldn't stand a chance. Converse County is one of a handful of Wyoming counties that have no zoning whatsoever, and it has enthusiastically shot down proposals to regulate development in the past. Given the look of tonight's crowd, this attempt at government interference will suffer the same fate. But the wind has dramatically muddled things in these parts.
Grizzled ranchers who likely would spit before they say the word "environmentalist" stand up and tout the benefits of green energy. Classic anti-government conservatives ask the county to save their beloved mountains from energy development. An employee of one of the biggest coal mines in the nation cautions against letting wind turbines go unregulated, the way coalbed methane did.
Then, a tall, lean man stands up to speak. For about nine minutes, he holds the floor with pointed comments, sprinkled with humor. "The second most egregious task of government is the denial of the use of a person's private property," he says. "The first is when Sheriff Becker over there takes away your personal liberty." Laughter. He worries about an influx of workers infecting the area with Gillette Syndrome — the social toll that a boom can take on the local community. Property values will plummet, he warns. The county should "take a deep breath and adopt the moratorium, because there are a lot of impacts that come with major development." He is a dyed-in-the wool Wyoming oilman, and his name is Diemer True.
True's father, H.A. "Dave" True, started his own drilling company in 1954. Today, True Companies is an energy, banking and ranching conglomerate, with everything from a pipeline company and a trucking business to slaughterhouses, not to mention a big chunk of Wyoming land. According to LandReport.com, the Trues hold more than 255,000 acres, putting them among the top 30 landowners in the nation.
Diemer True went to work for the family company after he graduated from college, became a partner in True Companies a few years later, and in 1972, was elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives. He has lived at the nexus of Wyoming politics and petroleum ever since.
These days, True can often be found in the headquarters of Diamond Oil, which he started with his sons a few years ago.
Nothing in his manner indicates the enormous amount of power he wields in this state — and in the nation. When he urges the government to save his beloved mountains from industrialization, you can almost forget that, up until now, True was firmly on the other side, aggressively attacking regulations intended to keep public lands from being, well, industrialized.
True served as chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a position from which he regularly urged the federal government to increase access to oil and gas development on public lands.
True was part of the Bush/Cheney energy task force, in which industry leaders influenced the administration's policies. As recently as 2006, he served on the board of Frontiers of Freedom, a neo-conservative, hard-right organization that calls itself the "antithesis of the green movement," fights against the Endangered Species Act and has recently taken up the torch of global warming skepticism.
True also served on the board of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a Denver-based property-rights, anti-environmental regulation group. * * *
Bob Whitton is a mustached, retired Air Force fighter pilot-turned- rancher who raises bulls on a small spread between Chugwater and Wheatland, across I-25 from the Laramie Range. There is broad support for wind development down here, and Whitton chairs the Renewable Energy Alliance of Landowners (REAL), a group with some 300 members who are fighting for the right to put turbines on their collective 800,000 acres of southeastern Wyoming. In that role, and as a private-property rights advocate in general, Whitton argued against True and his colleagues at the Converse County meeting.
Wind, it turns out, can make a rancher lots of money. Wind developers typically pay a signing bonus, rent during the testing phase and a payment during construction. When the turbines start kicking out juice, the cash flows regularly, for years to come: A turbine can net a landowner $4,000 for every megawatt per year. That could amount to as much as $55,000 per year per section (640 acres). Wyoming ranches are often measured by thousands of acres, so some landowners stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
That might keep cash-strapped ranchers from selling out to real estate developers or billionaire hobby ranchers, who sometimes close their land to hunters, says Whitton. "Would you rather see a wind turbine or a subdivision?" he asks.
The economic crisis has made it tough for wind developers to get financing. The Wyoming state Legislature this spring levied a generation tax on wind power, in addition to allowing a sales tax exemption on wind farms to "sunset" in 2011.
Combined with current property taxes, that could give Wyoming one of the least-favorable tax structures for wind farms among surrounding states. Every county in wind country, meanwhile, is grappling with its own level of rules, creating an uncertain regulatory environment for the industry.
But the biggest obstacle, by far, is lack of transmission capacity. "Most of the good sites [that have both strong wind and adequate transmission] have been leased and are off the market," says Brian Reilly of Whirlwind LLC, a Denver- and Casper-based wind firm with several Wyoming projects in the works.
The big markets for wind are in states with renewable portfolio standards, such as California and Colorado. (Wyoming has no renewable mandate.) So in order to get new wind power to those who want it, new transmission lines must be built from Wyoming to the south and west. "If we don't get transmission solved, we don't get any of the benefits," says Whitton. "Nothing happens."
* * *
In October, Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal told an energy conference that, in Wyoming, some folks who have made their money off gas and oil drilling and pipelines have "developed a sense of virtue about not destroying the environment," when faced with wind power. "They may be late conversions," he added, "but they are singing with great vigor in the front row of the choir."
Most likely, he was talking about Diemer True. True joined the choir last year, when he discovered that Rocky Mountain Power planned to string its 230-kilovolt transmission line right along La Prele Creek, where he has two ranches. Then, Wasatch Wind asked True and his neighbors to lease their land for turbines. True, nearby landowner (and World Bank vice president) Kenneth G. Lay and some of their neighbors held a meeting in Douglas in May 2009 to come up with a plan of action. Around 200 people showed up.
Now, the NLRA has some 600 members and, with its slick website, petition drives and well-oiled PR machine, it has gained enough clout to make traditional green groups jealous. Just months after the alliance formed, True took Rocky Mountain Power President Richard Walje up into the Laramie Range for a look around. As he basked in the quiet of the glades, pastures, aspens and ponderosas, Walje reportedly declared, "We can't build a power line here."
Rocky Mountain Power withdrew that route from consideration, moving it farther east — an unqualified victory for the group.
In its talk and actions, the NLRA and its members appear sincere; not only have they extended their reach beyond their backyards, but they're beginning — somewhat uncomfortably — to embrace a green attitude.
In October, the NLRA created the Northern Laramie Range Foundation to raise money to lease parcels of state land in the Laramie Range for recreational purposes. That will not only preclude wind development on those parcels, but it will also keep out other sorts of development — including oil and gas drilling.
True refuses to call himself an environmentalist: "I'd couch us as preservationists or conservationists."
* * *
Directly south of Rawlins, on a windswept mesa, Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz's company wants to build a 1,000-turbine wind farm on a patchwork of private and public lands. It will cover some 95,800 acres and generate 2,000 megawatts of power or more, equal to some of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the West. However, big sections of the farm overlap core sage grouse habitat.
The sage grouse was once plentiful across the sagebrush-covered West. As the sage was cleared for grazing, and later invaded by energy development and ranchettes, the bird's numbers plummeted. For the last five years, the prospect of the grouse being listed under the Endangered Species Act has loomed, something that could hit mining, ranching and energy here as hard as the spotted owl's listing hit timber in the Northwest. Wyoming has acted aggressively to put its own sage grouse conservation plan in place in hopes of averting a listing.
The state's strategy is simple: Find and map the parts of the state that are most critical to sage grouse, and protect these core areas, mostly through voluntary measures. The oil and gas companies have agreed to curtail activities in core areas — drilling is limited to one pad per section — or stay out of them altogether. In return, the state will streamline permitting and offer other incentives for drilling in non-core areas.
Because it wasn't much of a force — or a threat — when the core areas were drawn up, the wind industry was not involved. As a result, 23 percent of Wyoming's winds that are class 4 or higher — and about half or more of developable class 6 and 7 winds — are in core areas. And in July, the state put those winds off-limits by essentially banning big wind farms in core areas.
That has put the old-school energy in Wyoming at odds with the new. If wind development is allowed in core areas, it could undermine the integrity of the core-area strategy. That, in turn, could increase the likelihood of the feds listing sage grouse as endangered. And that would lead to stringent regulations for all the bird's habitat — including most of the current oil and gas fields and untapped reserves.
In Wyoming, there are two struggles. One is between the old school of energy and the new; the other pits the local view of energy against the global view. In the end, the failure to reconcile these dichotomies may be far more harmful to Wyoming's economy than any endangered species listing. More and more, the market is going to demand clean energy. Right now, however, Wyoming is not prepared to supply it.
The Converse County meeting ended with the planning commission voting to recommend a moratorium for the whole county. The county commissioners shot the moratorium down, but the NLRA continues its fight. And the struggle goes on.
On my way home, I stop at a place where the road nuzzles up against the wind farm's boundary. I slither through the fence and walk up to a turbine, until I'm directly beneath its blades.
The only sound is a low-pitched sort of watery sigh. The wind blows, the arms turn, and electrons flow through cables, down the tower, under the ground, and into the power lines where they'll join up with the coal-generated electrons 13 miles away. They flow into the bloodstream of the omnipotent, tentacled organism called the grid. Somewhere, someone flips a switch.
And there is light.
Jonathan Thompson is editor of High Country News. This article has been edited to fit. For the full version, go to www.hcn.org.
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wind turbines Wyoming
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